Twitter ye not

I joined Twitter probably about a year ago and followed some famous people, some friends, and a few library and publishing orientated sites, and then found it was something I couldn’t be bothered to log into on a daily or even weekly basis. I do keep coming back to it, trying to be keen, as it does have the potential to keep me uptodate with all sorts of useful library news, but this can easily be swamped by miscellaneous “stuff ” (I found The Bookseller believes in drowning its followers in tweets so have ‘unfollowed’ them.) I think my problem is selectivity, I need to be more ruthless, and ditch the dross. Litter ye not!

uploaded to flickr by bikertourist.org

I have loaded my twitterfeed into iGoogle and don’t much like the viewing box, as it requires me to scroll along to read the tweets fully, very irritating (I don’t just follow LibrGoddess honest!) If anyone has any better suggestions for viewing Twitter in iGoogle please let me know. Thanks to N Page for the tip off about JournoTwit which I will try and investigate, but I wonder if this can be embedded into iGoogle?

I like the friends network tool which Phil Bradley talks about, this enables you to see who your friends are following in a nifty way, and from their friends you can pick one and see who they are following and so on. Some of the people I follow are visualised below…

Then I clicked on ebookscambridge and the page expands to show me some of my followings in a larger circle and ebooks@cambridge followings in the middle… hours of fun!

If nothing else, I love the plethora of birdy images which have been generated by Twitter, but whether I ever use it regularly remains to be seen. I can certainly see its use for libraries to push out content and updates quickly to their users. That’s great and I’m all for it!

3 comments

I agree with some of your sentiments – I too find myself not logging on to Twitter for a few days, but I’m trying to train myself to be better since the start of Cam23!

At the Judge we use something called Hootsuite, which seems similar to JournoTwit (which I haven’t looked at yet) which allows you to view your tweets/hastags etc in columns. It works well for us especially as we can update the Library’s Facebook status and tweets simultaneously. It could be worth looking at if you don’t get on with JournoTwit – http://hootsuite.com/

Yes I have deleted my Twitter feed from iGoogle, I found it more irritating than useful. I probably look at Twitter once or twice a day for ebooks but only for about 10 mins. I’ve unfollowed a few timewasters, but I have picked up useful contacts as well. I’ll have a go at the friends thing, thanks for the tip.